When I started layout design and ops consulting in 2004, I
knew that I needed to appear on the web. I was in a hurry, so choosing my email
ISP for my web hosting for convenience’ sake was the path of least resistance. After all, I only
expected to need about six or eight pages – how big a job would it be to re-do
it later?
Yeah, about that. 60+ pages later, it’s a huge job. Over the
years I’ve added topics of general usefulness for folks (I hope), as well as examples
of custom layout designs for clients.
The creaky and arcane tools I started with in 2004 never really
got much of an upgrade. And recently, my previous ISP announced they would be shutting
down the tools, which would delete my site.
It’s probably for the best. The previous tools had been balky
and not remotely easy-to-use for the last five or so years. Not to mention that nearly 40% of the recent visits
to my site are coming from phones and tablets rather than traditional browsers.
My old site did a poor job of accommodating these visitors.
The new tools I am using allow better interfaces for these
devices, although I have not yet tweaked every page for best appearance. But
the most-commonly-visited pages should be better for mobile users now – and I
will get to the rest over the next few weeks.
Because of the arcane limitations of the Year 2000-era
tools, web addresses (URLs) for my previous site were non-standard. That means that
the addresses of content have changed on the new site, but nearly all of it has been recreated somewhere
on the new site. It was painful to give up a decade-and-a-half of others’ links
to my content, but it’s the price of existing in the current millennium.
Another consequence of retirement of these tools is that my
personal web pages on the Oakland Harbor Belt layout concept will also disappear. But
I’ve moved on to a new concept (more on that later) and I have archived the OHB
content to make it available in some form sometime in the future (as if anyone
is interested!).
When the numbers of visitors to layoutvision.com started to
grow quickly in 2008, I began paying closer attention to visitor- and page
view counts. Since the beginning of 2009 my site has served over 3.5 Million page
views. Not bad for a site that just started out as hanging out a consulting shingle in
cyberspace.
So thanks for your support and interest over the years, and I apologize for the inconvenience of lost URLs. If you would like to link to my content again, I encourage you to do so – and thanks for that effort.
So thanks for your support and interest over the years, and I apologize for the inconvenience of lost URLs. If you would like to link to my content again, I encourage you to do so – and thanks for that effort.
